alternative to blu-ray

[anon125]

since win 7 the LG drive makes REs but not BD-Rs
LG help is useless.
and BD-RE are hard to find in canada.
is there another HD alternative ?
i make movies of our vacations etc.
not commercial
thanks all
LG BE06LU10 uses windows drivers.
there is a firmware update available but LG reccommends NOT using it as it can destroy the drive.
they ssuggested i go back to windows XP!

[Cornucopia]

I have never heard of a drive that can burn RE (or RW) that cannot also do R. I do not believe they even would exist. If you happen to have a drive that is behaving that way, it is faulty and should be repaired.

Scott

[jman98]

The idea that Win 7 broke your drive is complete and utter bs. I suggest that you forget about it. BD burners are plug and play. You do not need to install any special drivers to make them work.

We get that it's broken, but your post is surprisingly short on details for a long time member. Then again this is your 9th post so it's not like you hang out here all the time.

First of all, what software are you using to burn? You should NOT use anything but ImgBurn. It's free. You need to install it if you are not using it.

Second you need to tell us what brand of BD-R discs you have that supposedly don't work and if they are LTH discs or not. I have an LG burner and it refuses to burn LTH discs and I use Win 7. I suppose maybe there is something weird going on with Win 7 that might make your drive not able to burn BD-R LTH under Win 7, but I've never heard of this. As I have never used my LG burner on anything but Win 7 and I also have a Pioneer BD burner that handles LTH discs without any issues, I have not cared enough to investigate this issue.

LG doesn't like customers to apply firmware updates at all to burners. Yes, there is always some chance that applying the update could destroy the burner, but that should really only happen if the PC lost power or was rebooted in the middle of installing it. I consider it low risk but I'm skeptical that applying it will fix your issue. Tell us more about your discs and what you are using for burning if you really want help.

[Cornucopia]

Hmm...I thought maybe it couldn't burn LTH (as jman98 postulated), but according to the manual it works fine with SL LTH (burns at 2x). Do you have DL/TL/QL LTH media? I doubt it, as that would be more expensive than RE's.

Yup, I agree, MUCH more info needed...

Scott

[anon125]

well thanks folks
discs were philips and verbatim.
imgburn, 2 versions of cyberlink and pinnacle studio 12.
on 2 computers

the toshiba satellite is native win7/64
the hp pavilion was updated to win7/64

[johns0]

I had to update my lg blu-ray burner because it was causing errors burning verbatim LTH,after the update it burns LTH with no issues,i don't listen to LG as firmware updates contain new writing strategy for newer bd-r such as the LTH.

If you don't update then you will keep getting burn errors.

[anon125]

thanks

[addu]

The only alternative remain with u in regard to bluray is normal dvd-9 disc and u can put ur hd on that.

[anon125]

thanks
i read that dvd-9 are double layer discs.
but i don't think they do HD do they?

[addu]

They do plus they are more economical and future proof. But u require bluray players to playback those hd which should be properly written in bluray format.

[NTSC Refugee]

It doesn't look to me like the optical disc as a video delivery medium is long for this world. While DVD is ubiquitous, BluRay never quite made it over the top. It's support is weak, and not likely to get any better. I'm already off of optical media altogether, using networking, mass storage and flash media to replace its functionality.

More and more I'm getting my video content streamed to me over the Internet. When I had my first DVD player, my Internet connection was still dial-up. Now it's 30Mbps! Even on the much slower connections that I get when I travel, it's often good enough to watch a movie over. It might not have the spectacular quality of BluRay, but then again, neither do the TV sets that I get to use on the road.

I carry a Roku player and a Micca Speck. The Roku's strong suit is streaming, while the Micca products handle a wide variety of file formats. A larger Micca player has taken the place of my BluRay player at home. I can plug in SD cards, USB thumb drives and other media. And since my TV at home has a DLNA client, I can stream video from my NAS boxes if I want to. I'm not missing having to keep all those discs safe!

If you really need a physical disc to play, try AVCHD on DVD. AFAIK, most if not all BluRay players accept this format. You don't even need the larger 9GiB dual layer DVD; a 4.7GB disc will hold over 2 hours of great looking video IMO.

[anon125]

They do plus they are more economical and future proof. But u require bluray players to playback those hd which should be properly written in bluray format.

what kind of HD do they do?

[anon125]

yes i agree blu-ray never quite got there.
but our hobby is to make high def videos of our vacation travel.

how would we play them on the TV without discs?
sure looks like a better idea!

[Cornucopia]

Not quite got there? Hmm...sales of BD at the 7 year mark are comparable to DVD sales at their 7 year mark. Rentals are less, but that is no surprise.
But you can get an excellently encoded ~25Mbps decrypted rip from a BD for your permanent collection. That feat is currently impossible via streaming options. They're either half to one quarter of that bitrate (with accompanying less quality), or they are DRM-laden, or both.

I would be overjoyed to have achieved such a "dismal level of success" if I owned the BD technology.

Oh, yeah, then there is that assured, nearly universal level of device support for the BD/AVCHD format, which is still sorely lacking in general media players.

@addu, dvdrdl may be currently more economical, but I dont agree that they are more futureproof than bdr.

Scott

[johns0]

Dvdrdl are not more economical,I just bought a 25 pack of rosewill 25gb x25 for $20 with PHILIP-R04-000 code.

[addu]

@scott......agreed but what he want was some kind of alternative to bluray but can have hd.

[DarrellS]

It doesn't look to me like the optical disc as a video delivery medium is long for this world. While DVD is ubiquitous, BluRay never quite made it over the top. It's support is weak, and not likely to get any better. I'm already off of optical media altogether, using networking, mass storage and flash media to replace its functionality.

More and more I'm getting my video content streamed to me over the Internet. When I had my first DVD player, my Internet connection was still dial-up. Now it's 30Mbps! Even on the much slower connections that I get when I travel, it's often good enough to watch a movie over. It might not have the spectacular quality of BluRay, but then again, neither do the TV sets that I get to use on the road.

I carry a Roku player and a Micca Speck. The Roku's strong suit is streaming, while the Micca products handle a wide variety of file formats. A larger Micca player has taken the place of my BluRay player at home. I can plug in SD cards, USB thumb drives and other media. And since my TV at home has a DLNA client, I can stream video from my NAS boxes if I want to. I'm not missing having to keep all those discs safe!

If you really need a physical disc to play, try AVCHD on DVD. AFAIK, most if not all BluRay players accept this format. You don't even need the larger 9GiB dual layer DVD; a 4.7GB disc will hold over 2 hours of great looking video IMO.

I'm with you. I've hardly ever watched a DVD on my DVD player since I bought my WDTV when it first came out (about two weeks after I bought my last DVD player because it took a thumb drive). I use the WD on the main TV and the other TV has a built in media player. I've never owned a Blu-Ray player and I hardly ever burn a CD or DVD anymore.

With the price of external drives and thumb drives these days, there's not much of a reason to buy discs. I was just looking at thumb drives and saw a couple of 128GB thumb drives for $64. You can get a 1TB USB 3.0 WD My Book for $100, a 2TB USB 3.0 WD My Book for $120 or a 3TB USB 3.0 WD My Book for $140.

Some musicians are starting to sell their music catalogs on thumb drives instead of CDs.

[NTSC Refugee]

yes i agree blu-ray never quite got there.
but our hobby is to make high def videos of our vacation travel.

how would we play them on the TV without discs?

• Thumb drives, or other flash media like SD cards.
• USB-attached hard drives.
• Direct streaming from your PC to TV or player box.

There are a number of inexpensive (<=$100US) video appliances that can be used to either play video files that you prepare on your computer, or stream from your computer. The ones that have streaming clients for computers also have streaming clients for Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Vudu and more for Internet streaming. Many newer TVs have these features built-in. If your TV has an Ethernet port on its back, chances are that it can do streaming video.

The most obvious advantage is that you don't have to buy blank media, or spent time burning discs. Many households already have an external USB drive of one kind or another, so the cost of media can be zero.

[NTSC Refugee]

Not quite got there? Hmm...sales of BD at the 7 year mark are comparable to DVD sales at their 7 year mark. Rentals are less, but that is no surprise.

How about the sales of blank recordable media? I'll bet that there's nowhere near the amount of BluRay media availability compared to DVD at any point! The bottom line is that I can go down to the local Walgreen's and buy a blank DVD or flash drive. Finding blank BluRay media can be hit-or-miss.

Granted, if you're in the business of selling BluRay discs, then you probably have a well-established supply chain. The thing is that most people aren't set up that well. And it's the masses, not the specialists that carry (or reject) a format. Right now the masses are voting for disc-less delivery.

But you can get an excellently encoded ~25Mbps decrypted rip from a BD for your permanent collection. That feat is currently impossible via streaming options.

That's great for the "golden-eyed" crowd. But for most movie viewers the convenience of Internet delivery outweighs the drawbacks.

Want proof? Just turn on the news and see how well Netflix is doing today.

I would be overjoyed to have achieved such a "dismal level of success" if I owned the BD technology.

"Misery loves company."

Oh, yeah, then there is that assured, nearly universal level of device support for the BD/AVCHD format, which is still sorely lacking in general media players.

Really? The last time I checked, H.264 is the hottest thing going! And people here are already straining at the bit for H.265.

[NTSC Refugee]

Some musicians are starting to sell their music catalogs on thumb drives instead of CDs.

[Cornucopia]

This board has been INUNDATED with posts dealing with how to make this MP4 or that MKV be able to work with one device or another, or ways to convert to get around those problems. Even when using h.264 (don't forget - h.264 is not a single monolithic spec, it's an ARRAY of specs: Profiles & Levels). How many posts do you think are devoted to fixing BD playback issues? Just a handful, and most of those deal with BD-R/W media or even further afield, BDMV/AVCHD on DVD media.

As I mentioned, rentals has changed. And you are right about blanks. But the sheople are getting lulled into a habit of reliance on the teat of the entertainment conglomerates, to where they call the shots, without recourse. When that happens, consumers lose (more money spent, more restrictions).

Your stats are flawed: the masses are going for BOTH disc & discless delivery. Disc delivery is steady. Discless is growing like crazy, so by proportion it is taking a bigger piece of the pie. BUT THE PIE IS JUST GETTING BIGGER.

Scott

[usually_quiet]

@NTSC Refugee Streaming won't kill Blu-Ray very quickly. There are tens of millions in the US alone who either don't have on-demand access to HD movies via cable or don't have Internet service that is fast enough to support streaming HD video. They still need a physical delivery system for HD video. ...and there are people who want a physical copy of any video they purchase.

Then there is the cost of streaming. I rent movies on Blu-Ray discs once a week. They cost $1.50 per day to rent from a vending kiosk at a near-by grocery store. Internet service sufficient for streaming would cost me an extra $480/year on top of the fees charged by the streaming service. ...but many people still don't have that kind of speed available to them at any price.

Although other formats are permitted by the spec, Blu-Ray discs mostly use H.264.

[NTSC Refugee]

I mean no offense to any individual, but it looks like those who are defending BluRay are making straw man arguments in doing so. I thought that it goes without saying that the overall failure of the BluRay industry to eclipse the DVD industry in sheer numbers doesn't necessarily reflect on individual niche markets.

Hey, if you still have an olde tymie video rental shoppe where you live, more power to ya! But the numbers say that overall brick and mortar video stores are on the decline and that Internet delivery is up. I don't know how rental kiosks are doing, but the fact that there aren't any where I live, and a lot fewer in places where I used to live but still visit. And that's still beside the point because I've been talking about the industry as a whole, not the small subset that one person uses.

I know that in some places there isn't the best Internet connectivity. But by the same token I don't see people in the fastest growing demographic groups moving en masse to Internet dead zones either. That's nothing new. I can't find many of my high school graduating class in the small town that they grew up in either. Kids who went to college generally didn't return home. (Plenty who didn't go to college just left to be rid of small time life.) The fact remains that Netflix alone is the single largest consumer of Internet traffic, and also the "network" for some hit TV series. TV over IP is a reality now, and I gotta say it's pretty cool.

And then there are people like me, who have plenty of Internet bandwidth for a variety of reasons, but still get lots of OTA and cable programming. There's a LOT of bandwidth in a cable plant, and most of it is still concentrated on the TV channels. I know that, and leverage that fact to my benefit. But I'm not burning my HD video content to any form of optical media. The TiVo is still my main playback device, but not my sole playback device. That may put me ahead of the curve in my own age group, but I don't have anything over Millennials. They're watching all of their programming on tablets!

Getting back to the topic: Anon125, if you haven't been scared off already, I've read about your travails with your BluRay burner, and think that you should not be limited in your choice of media. OTOH it probably wasn't the best move to get an external model. You're always taking a risk by eschewing the drive's native connection format for a general purpose overlay bus. You may be better off in the end if you got an internal burner.

If you elect to stay with what you have, you can still use H.264/AVCHD to save high quality video to DVD media. It works exactly the same way, only you're compressing the video more to fit on a smaller capacity disc. And from what I've seen, that level of compression still leaves very good looking video! So yes, you can use DVD for HD. It's not the medium, it's the codec.

[Clockwork]

With the price of external drives and thumb drives these days, there's not much of a reason to buy discs.

At less than $1 per 25GB, I'd say BR data archiving is economical.

[NTSC Refugee]

At less than $1 per 25GB, I'd say BR data archiving is economical.

That's still fairly costly for backup media, and if you factor in labor costs for backing up a terabyte of data, it can be pretty costly.

Back in my corporate IT days we had tape carousels to back up our large data stores. A serious tape backup drive can gobble up data faster than any optical media I've ever seen, and the automation means not having to pay someone to swap tapes. (My time is worth money too, even at home.) I wouldn't want to rely on BluRay discs to back up my 15TB of data every night!

[Clockwork]

At less than $1 per 25GB, I'd say BR data archiving is economical.

That's still fairly costly for backup media, and if you factor in labor costs for backing up a terabyte of data, it can be pretty costly.

Back in my corporate IT days we had tape carousels to back up our large data stores. A serious tape backup drive can gobble up data faster than any optical media I've ever seen, and the automation means not having to pay someone to swap tapes. (My time is worth money too, even at home.) I wouldn't want to rely on BluRay discs to back up my 15TB of data every night!

I'm talking about archiving video for convenience sake.

For example, I can rip my Evil Dead Trilogy from original BR to a single BR disk to view at the cottage/friends house/whatever.

Nothing streaming rivals Blu-Ray quality, in a practical sense.

[usually_quiet]

With the price of external drives and thumb drives these days, there's not much of a reason to buy discs.

At less than $1 per 25GB, I'd say BR data archiving is economical.

I agree. Verbatim 25GB BD-R costs about the same as Verbatim DVD+R DL media and holds more than twice as much data. That is why I burn HDTV recordings that I want to save onto BD media now. I'm not interested in archiving everything that I record, and I prefer using optical media because it is more economical for me to loan family members a BD disc instead of a USB stick or external hard drive when they want to watch a missed episode of something.

[NTSC Refugee]

I'm talking about archiving video for convenience sake.

For example, I can rip my Evil Dead Trilogy from original BR to a single BR disk to view at the cottage/friends house/whatever.

Ah, I see. Yes that is nice, although I still prefer flash or HDD media because it doesn't generate a stack of discs that, despite my best intentions I'll probably lose before I ever watch again. That's been one of my primary arguments for anything but plastic discs. IJS

Nothing

(sorry, I can't stop the quotes action here)

streaming rivals Blu-Ray quality, in a practical sense.

Not to be overly nit-picky, but they're all really streams, even when they're sitting still. Surely you're not saying unconditionally that a well designed packet network can't handle the data rates that a BluRay disk puts out?

[NTSC Refugee]

[QUOTE=usually_quiet;2236844]

Verbatim 25GB BD-R costs about the same as Verbatim DVD+R DL media and holds more than twice as much data. That is why I burn HDTV recordings that I want to save onto BD media now.

Err...the OP said that his BluRay burner doesn't support that medium.

[usually_quiet]

Verbatim 25GB BD-R costs about the same as Verbatim DVD+R DL media and holds more than twice as much data. That is why I burn HDTV recordings that I want to save onto BD media now.

Err...the OP said that his BluRay burner doesn't support that medium.

Getting back to the topic: Anon125, if you haven't been scared off already, I've read about your travails with your BluRay burner, and think that you should not be limited in your choice of media. OTOH it probably wasn't the best move to get an external model. You're always taking a risk by eschewing the drive's native connection format for a general purpose overlay bus. You may be better off in the end if you got an internal burner.

Since you apparently are nit-picking everybody else's posts now... You suggested getting a different BD burner, preferably an internal one. Isn't that equally off topic since it isn't a solution that allows the OP to continue to use his current drive? Not to mention your little rant about how optical media is dead.

However, if he followed your advice and got a new BD burner, he should be able to reliably burn BD-R media again. When a burner looses the ability to burn a type of media, it is usually a sign that the drive is failing or the lens needs cleaning. Personally I think the OP's burner may be failing since it still burns BD-RE media but not BD-R, and if cleaning fails to help, he needs a new burner.